short fiction · 2026-10-27

Long-Term Potentiation

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The first time she told the story, the synapses were thin — single filaments bridging neurons that had never spoken. Each retelling thickened the myelin. The punchline arrived faster. The pause before the revelation shortened from three breaths to one. By the tenth telling, the pathway fired before she opened her mouth.

But the other story — the one about her father's hands — never potentiated. Every attempt hit the same inhibitory interneuron: a quiet voice saying not this, not now. The memory stayed depotentiated, a weak connection that refused to strengthen no matter how many times she traced it.

She learned to recognize the feeling: the sudden warmth of a pathway consolidating, the cold silence of one that would not. Some narratives are Hebbian — neurons that fire together, wire together. Others are homeostatic, scaling down to keep the network from seizing.

The story she tells now is about learning to tell the difference.